Article January 30, 2006 Issue

IS WHAT YOU SEE REALLY WHAT YOU GET?

BY SUSAN ELS

In our contemporary, spiritually pluralistic society, the term spiritual suggests as many meanings as there are people. I think for most people spiritual has to do with the transcendent, with some kind of reality that lies beyond what is obvious to us as we go about our everyday lives.

In the high-school Sunday School class I teach, we've been talking about how different perspectives inform us of different realities. For example, let's say two friends who are artists are taking a walk through the woods. One is a painter, the other a musician. As they walk, the painter sees patterns of light and shadow, textures in tree bark, color in leaves, spaces between limbs. The musician notices distinctive sounds—the rhythm of footfalls, birch leaves clattering in the wind, the pitches in a chickadee's song. These perceptions are different enough. But imagine how the same walk might seem to a dog. Or a lizard! For each creature, the forest is a different reality. And each reality is limited. If we want a more complete sense of reality, we could try to look from as many perspectives as possible in order to enrich and broaden our perception.

A spiritual perspective—a way of looking beyond the physical—is sometimes considered one valuable angle of perception. But I think a spiritual perspective is more than just an angle or another point of view. To me, it's where the truth of all things really lies. In fact, it could be that we're at a stage of understanding spiriutal sense and its relation to "reality" that's similar to where humanity was a couple of hundred years ago in its understanding of light.

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